A Smaller Twist
by Qu-ko
Summary: A unique set of one-shots done in response to a self-challenge, in which I attempt to make some of the GX fandom's most cringe-inducing tropes into something more workable, or even enjoyable. You be the judge.
1. Adam's Aftermath

So, here's the story behind this, as I'm sure you're all _dying_ to know.

I decided, in a whimsical attempt to jumpstart my own writing and to give myself a chance to write outside of my proverbial box, to allow a few friends an opportunity to throw prompts at me. The only stipulation was that these prompts had to be of a concept they knew made me _writhe in my seat_, based on how much I disliked it. It ranges from tropes to pairings, though it's mostly tropes at this point.

I told them to do their worst, of course. And they did.

Yep.

So, this series of one-shots will reflect what I am killing pieces of myself little by little to write about. The idea is that I will write about them _my_ way, in a way I like a hell of a lot better than the "usual" fare. I'll leave how I did up to you guys to decide, but I tried to break away from the mold, if nothing else. Warnings will be slotted below the prompt in bold, in case they happen to be needed.

**Prompt:** "Jehu" is an actual character, not Yubel in Johan's body.

* * *

More than anything else, Jehu hated being alone. It was strange for someone like him, but he always tried to give himself something to do, to concentrate on. With nothing to devote his attention to, he inevitably began to think on himself, and once that happened, he tended to lose what little grip he had on humanity.

With any thought about his circumstances, he came to feel like a void of things, an empty vessel which experience and personality refused to stick to. He came to wish that someone would release his strings and let him stop moving, or thinking, when he was not needed.

But Johan Andersen certainly did not want him, and he was half of the reason for his existence in the first place.

"How horrible. Your avoidance makes me feel like a thrice-removed cousin's ghost at the family dinner."

Usually, Jehu was the one who tried to avoid Johan, although Johan had no objections to this himself. To him, this boy was only a strange gestalt that pulled at the undeniable hollow inside him, as if parts of his flesh wished to return to the time when he had been sundered from within that immaculate reserve of creation energy. More than likely, only the other half of the reason for his existence knew about it at all, and even then, only through the fact she'd had plenty of time to root through every mental and spiritual thread of his being to find out.

Johan sank to the ground, pressing his back against the stone lighthouse of the harbor and looking immensely troubled. It was lonely nowadays, especially at night; occasionally, one of the Tenjoins would come out, even more occasionally bringing a conversation partner with them. Jehu knew Johan thought it was a fitting sanctuary for them, because they both seemed to embody the gentler, nurturing side of the ocean.

Of course he did. He had that tiny little tidbit of memory, floating around in the fathomless black space that was his mind. They only presented themselves when his train of thought arrived at them on its own, and finally had something to connect them to; until then, they drifted. It was like wandering around in a dungeon level of a video game for the first time to fill out the onscreen map…

…Ah, like so.

"I don't have any cousins, anyway," Johan said, moments later. "That's not really a point _against_ you. The only ones who even know about this whole thing are the two of us here right now…"

"So you say, but who's really the one being punished here?"

Although the doppelganger was lingering behind him and safely — dangerously — out of his line of sight, he was sure Jehu's lips had just twitched and his eyes had narrowed. If they still possessed the same supernatural brightness he'd been told, second-hand, that they'd had when… _at the time_, he was sure they'd have just flashed out at the ocean like two extra lighthouse beacons.

He stayed silent, so Jehu followed up. "You had the right to that intimacy from the beginning, you know. A kinship created by having been born into the world from parents, and growing through childhood as a human. I can only _envy_ that in you, although surely you must have had your fair share of lethal jealousy by now."

The poison in his tone was palpable. Johan noted through the murky haze, or his own murky melancholy, he couldn't quite tell which, that it really had been more than just him that had lent to this person.

He couldn't help but make an expression somewhere between a grimace and a smirk at that, though. Even after everything, he still referred to Yubel as a person, too. And Jehu as well, despite being the half-extant reminder of it all on top of that, who should have been even less. But Johan was incapable of demeaning someone that way, no matter how muddled and disdainful his feelings about them might have been.

"It still bothers you," Jehu tried again when Johan failed to take what suddenly seemed less like bait than before. "Why else would you come out here to sulk? Aside from the fact you knew I'd follow you either way. You're only worried about leaving tomorrow because it means you get too much time to dwell on it all."

He glared at Johan as if daring him to argue, but Johan thought he might know a different answer to that. "Well… all people, I think they judge other people's actions by what they would or wouldn't do. Right and wrong are just personal judgments about what's most important to you."

The copy snorted inelegantly. "So, that Yubel was wrong because she wouldn't have done it your way? Well, _that _was obvious from the very beginning." Even in his clear attempt to distance the concept of someone like Yubel from himself, Johan picked up on the slightly distressed note in his voice. It was like listening to himself… no, more like listening to the manifestation of everything terrible about himself he tried to keep a tight lid on speaking to him in a foreign lilt of his own voice. Johan believed wholeheartedly in ghosts, duel spirits, inexplicable phenomena, and maybe even a god if he really wanted to top it all off, but until now, he was sure near-cartoony interpretations of the devil on his shoulder to whisper sweet temptations and painful truths in his ear were not anywhere on that list.

"Then, what would you have done, Johan?"

He didn't know. They both fell silent, but the answer was clear nonetheless. If the apple didn't fall far from the tree, a duplicated, synthetic apple must always land directly next to its unwilling material donor.

After a while, Jehu grew bored of watching the stars past Johan's shoulder and melted away again, with that unique half-alive ability to draw himself out of reality even further than most spirits could. That night, while Johan dreamed about moving past all the hardships and gaining his happiness through others like never before, Jehu dreamed in his metaphysical way about what it must be like to be human enough to have that kind of intimacy to lose.


	2. Addiction

This one's a winner, though. I happen to like the result a lot better than the last disjointed piece of fuck I ground out, though.

**Prompt:** Genderbend either Johan or Juudai, and write your OT3 (Juudai/Yubel/Johan).

**(Warning for very slight, non-explicit sexuality.)  
**

* * *

Johanna almost made herself give up at first. It scared her how quickly she relaxed into his touch, how much she loved to see his mouth quirk into a smile or run her hands over his shoulders in that ever-supportive way. She tried not to notice how eagerly she came home every day, exhausted from a long day's worth of dueling. Her eyes skimmed the small house, searching for Juudai even as she took her key out of the lock.

She could sit on the sofa with Juudai for hours, talking, watching TV, doing nothing. He would lean heavily, wearily against her, and she would just appreciate the comfortable weight of his head against her chest. Sometimes after he came back, unpredictably as ever, he invited her into the shower with him, letting her carefully ease off his shirt and wash away the tension and soreness that stained his skin. He was always there when she needed him, always before she knew she needed him.

It was frightening at first. Eventually, the similarity started coming up as a joke between the two of them, with increasing frequency once she had made clear her acceptance of the whole thing.

"Jeez," she always said, stretching on the couch as credits rolled on the TV and cards and spirits were spread out all over the room, "If I'd known we were gonna be together so much, I should've told you to fuse me and you together, too."

"Yubel wouldn't like that," Juudai would reply, "she's still not sure how she feels about competition, you know."

"Well, now that you say that, you should _definitely_ do it." And they'd both laugh; at first, only Johanna, but in time, Juudai learned to deal with his life for the ridiculous farce comedy it was and joined her. Her laugh was too powerful and captivating to leave by itself; so much less fragile than his.

He knew what he had with Yubel was precious, and he was prepared to protect it, but he did not seem afraid of needing it anymore, Johanna thought to herself. She couldn't think of anything else that made her feel such cold fear in her stomach anymore. Sometimes she would watch Yubel manifest from across a room, each contained, disturbingly graceful little movement, and the hair on the back of her neck would rise because she knew she was wearing an expression to mirror hers, once upon a time. There was something she could not stand to lose, and she needed it every day, and fear of the consequences would never make her able to give it up.

She remembered pamphlets from her first year of high school that listed warning signs. They said, "You know it's addiction when it changes your life." She remembered that line and almost didn't agree to give Juudai the key to her house. But she realized her life was changing anyway since far too long ago to be certain anymore, and it didn't matter that she'd never have to go back to Duel Academia to see why. The moment Juudai came over and offered to let her speak to Yubel on equal ground, she gave up for good, recalling another silly proverb: "You can choose to start, but you need help to stop."

Johanna didn't want to quit anymore.


	3. Dark Sheep

Although _I hate her a lot for this ughhhhhhhh_, the friend who suggested this also managed to get a pretty good deal out of it. This is not only the longest one yet, but also the best, in my opinion.

...That could change, since I have my work cut out for me yet, but it's certainly something.

(Hint: Run while you still can.)

**Prompt:** Supreme King Jehu and Supreme Queen Haou.

**(Warning for somewhat more pronounced but still non-explicit sexuality, dark and dreary imagery, and a certain bout of violence near the end...) **

* * *

The first time Jehu saw the young woman who arrogantly called herself "The Supreme Queen," loved by none, he thought she was little more than an especially life-like puppet. Even when she moved to cast her gaze upon him, in an act he knew sent all others in their right mind scrambling for their lives, it possessed nothing but a singular, dispassionate intensity.

Blood-darkened red and festering black winked at him as the figure packed in armor and ornament moved emphatically within that group of standing dead men, only the dead men didn't know that they were deceased until they were in pieces on the ground. They had no chance against this intimidating puppet of pretty death.

The second time he saw her was when he actually spoke to her, in their first official meeting. He'd proposed it, of course, and when a few underlings did their undercover homework and found he was not the prince of a near-yet-far kingdom that did not actually exist, Jehu stirred their memories about with a little mental suggestion, and there was no more resistance after that. He knew exactly what he wanted, but like any good predator, he knew how to be patient and work for it. Perhaps she would dangle the prize above him for a while, but that was acceptable. He'd play by her rules, for the time being, no matter how stacked her rules were.

During the arrangement, two different warrior monsters had burst into her chamber two separate times to inquire about conquests having gone slightly against plan, and what the next course of action should be. Both times, she responded impartially, in a deadpan tone that was impossible to even extrapolate annoyance from; just answers with no emotional backing. Much the same as she was regarding Jehu himself, in fact.

The Supreme Queen said little to him as he explained himself in fairly few words. What she did say was all that was needed to stick to anyone who would listen, though.

"If you are inadequate, you will die."

Another statement of fact, lacking any threatening quality to it outside of what sense of threat might have been evoked in the listener. But Jehu was not afraid of a statement of truth, a truth that he could just as easily bend at his leisure anyway.

"I understand. I hope I satisfy well enough that it need not come to that, then. But I suppose if you lose your need for me, you may kill me if it pleases you."

He smiled at her, with inescapable sincerity. The Queen merely huffed, barely noticeably.

"Very well. Take your leave."

* * *

It took barely a week and a half for Jehu to rise high enough in the ranks that he was trusted enough to enter the Supreme Queen's chambers without difficulty. He rarely spent much time in there when it was not necessary to present his newest attack plan to her, however.

The latest victory over a newly-conquered region had been secured by one of Jehu's regiments. Many of that particular troop had been made up of a clan of monsters drafted forcibly from a previous city takeover, one that had been in a hostile and violent conflict with the yet-unconquered and considerably more prosperous settlement across the sprawling grassland. Finally, they had the chance to take their revenge, and most did so with morbid delight — they killed not only a vast swath of the fighting men and women, but many civilians and children and even the elderly.

Instead of risking the loss of manpower, they poisoned the water-wells that littered the now-dusty plains, and soon their enemy tribe was no more.

The ex-prince, now clothed in rags, drank with like-minded lordlings in tatters, and they all thought themselves clever for pulling the act off successfully. The former civilians, far more nameless, were pushed to the side and congregated mostly amongst themselves. They pretended not to see the fallen king and the head of a renowned family of thieves tossing dice in the corner, in the spirit of celebrating what little they had left to be happy about.

Jehu, lacking the disquieting features every member of the secret celebration possessed (horns, wings, third eyes, stomachs with enough acidity to burn holes through the floor), decided he didn't feel like posing as an out-of-place supervisor and retreated up the stairs to the highest room in the castle.

He felt the pair of eyes sticking to his back from one of the guards at the base of the spiraling stairwell all too keenly. They belonged to a barely-adult boy; his hair was too long, eyes too young, and the thin draw of his lips much too resentful. Immediately, Jehu knew what would transpire here in just a few hours — and, he thought smugly to himself, he didn't even have to be a future seer to be able to read this boy's fortune with no uncertainty.

He entered the chamber, dimly lit to most eyes, and knelt to her. To his mild surprise, she was the one who addressed him first.

"There were survivors," the Supreme Queen said flatly. "They fled when they caught on. You were careless."

Indeed, that seemed to be the crux of the matter, but her only indication was the slight rising in volume of her voice at what would've been a displeased criticism in any other tyrant. Not only did her voice fail to sound quite feminine enough, it had a peculiar way of emphasizing points while completely shutting out all traces of an emotional lilt.

"There was _a_ survivor," Jehu corrected her in the most polite and informed tone he could come up with. "Believe me, the warriors of Landstar went out for double duty yesterday, and oh so eagerly, I might add! They confirmed the Dragohuman clan was completely annihilated, except for one straggler. Rest assured, however, I know exactly where that straggler is right now." When the Supreme Queen continued to look at him in a way he playfully extrapolated to be expectant in some way, he added, "…And how best to dispose of him."

She did not say anything for a moment. Far be it from her to hesitate, but to the best of Jehu's understanding, it was the sort of silence the Queen employed when she was calculating her decision with the most callous and frigid of tactical logic. Finally, she moved, just enough to make her armor clank faintly from the momentum, and he'd discerned it as her usual cue to oblige someone to continue.

"You'll find the guard who normally covers the morning shift below your chamber has a little something to hide," he said with a helping of warm humor. Her eyes shifted off towards the door for an instant, but did nothing else. Jehu took it as a sign she acknowledged his report as having potential to be valid, at least.

He found himself giving her a long look then, an endless look; a look which suggested that he was of a deviant nature too full of brutal truth to be truly one-sided. His eyes moved over her sharp face as his smirk dropped away to reveal something arguably more candid. Each step he took towards her was relaxed and evenly paced, and he thought with great pleasure that if any of the Supreme Queen's other warriors, her advisers, her servants, her captives, or anyone even a single rank lower on the chain of command saw this scene, they'd die just as surely as if they'd crossed Her Highness on a bad day.

The Queen did not have bad days. She had successful conquests and unsuccessful conquests.

It took a long, long moment for the proverbial penny to drop. But when it did, it did so like lead through glue. A slow fall, but no less heavy. When it did, he kissed her fearlessly.

It turned out she was a virgin the first time they bedded down together. She was rarely treated as a woman more than an individual who surpassed gender where it counted, so it came as little surprise to him. Jehu was therefore wicked with his teasing, but made up for it with some strange concept of tenderness, dragging playful fingers along every feeling part of her just to hear the obscure changes in her breathing. Afterwards, while he slept tan, nude, and completely at ease atop the sheets, he ran his hands over her, pretending to himself that the sounds of the imaginary turning of gears in her head he'd caused were the signs of a sliver of emotion, groaning in her head like a rotting beam supporting a lavish house.

As far as he was concerned, they still made up for the verbal groaning he couldn't manage to draw from her, no matter how hard or how delicately he tried.

* * *

Although no one, man or monster or anything in-between, could hope to marry a tyrant with a suitor — and nor did many want to — it became common practice that Jehu was referred to as the Supreme King in the following months. Time passed from that point much like his courtship of her, in his perspective; ill-considered, hastily developed, and yet somehow as workable as it was simple to perform.

The composition and deployment of the warrior squads and generals in the castle was ephemeral and unstable at best. Despite the overwhelming number of troops and soldiers who went out to whittle down the enemy forces failing to return, somehow the castle always managed to fill gaps where they opened with little trouble. Brainwashing and memory erasure had become a more popular method than forcing captive warriors to fight for the side of the Supreme Queen and King, as it turned out most were much more keen to die now than be made to have a hand in the demise of the last remaining vestiges of freedom in this world.

Soon, Jehu became able to count the number of known sanctuaries left on one hand. The smaller ones were only able to delay the inevitable anymore, but the largest one had become the final line of defense for the remainder of free people. It wasn't any secret that survivors of all races, ages, origins, and abilities had come together beyond the boundaries of discrimination or favoritism with the intent of surviving an ever-nearing extinction. With ingenuity of the same flavor as the Supreme Queen's when she first began her reign, they'd found increasingly resourceful ways to stave off intrusions and raids of all kinds.

The Queen had instructed her army to let the last city be for the time being, until all other obstacles were out of the way. Jehu knew he wasn't the only one who questioned her logic at the time — murmurs in the halls of the castle were too loud and doubtful not to overhear by accident, much less feign deafness about. It was ridiculous to ignore a city that would only continue to grow more difficult every time a new settlement was destroyed or captured, and anyone else would have opted to nip the problem in the bud rather than let the desperation of the barely-alive become too prominent a force.

The line of thinking began to draw him towards wondering just how she had taken hold of enough power to become such a feared entity in so little time. Jehu knew she had only been in power for four months or so before he'd taken any interest in her, and during that time, she went from being unheard of to a name that made people want to fall to their knees and cry at the idea of the fates worse than death her captives often succumbed to. Even talk about being converted to pure energy for a tool that only drove more evil, or on the receiving end of experiments centered around it…

He let his thoughts trail off when he noticed the smoke cloud billowing outside the window, the glow of fire underlighting the landscape and occasionally flashing up in tiny sparks to wink at him from afar.

The Supreme Queen made some rustling noises to his side, followed by the sharp clanking of her armor. Jehu regarded her with a hint of boredom. "It's not even dawn. Must you really go so early?"

She ignored him. Her silence said enough for him, anyway, and Jehu could appreciate it for what it was. The avoidance of casual flattering lies pleased him, in a way. She never lied, to him or to anyone, and answered questions if the answer was not obvious. He was content in the idea there was little need for words outside of that. Some actions knew words no tongue could form.

His eyes were fixed on the Queen as they headed out to battle, a menacing monotone pillar tall amongst her followers no matter the physical height difference. She hadn't gone out to battle in a while, but it was fitting that the last stronghold she needed to capture would be taken at her hand.

They would capture it, then.

The last war did not light up the darkness of midday; it was between people, not weapons. It was waged almost too quietly, with slit throats and drowned corpses instead of exploded gunpowder or brutal skewerings. But the King and Queen knew it was real.

The people, too, knew it was real. It was clear in how many simply gave up after trying to run away, too overtaken by the approaching despair. Running no longer worked after it started to cling to their backs and breathe down their necks every waking moment. In the end, Jehu regretted that the battle did not last longer, for a better sense of true finality.

But when they returned to the castle, as strangely silent as they were relieved (were they really? was there any way to know anymore?), the Supreme Queen called the Supreme King to their presently-shared chamber.

"It feels like the indentation for a new paragraph of history," he said with a shrug that felt a lot less airy than it looked. The deafening sense of "now what?" that was rushing through the ones that still lived almost stripped him of the desire to ask at all.

But Jehu wanted to know, too.

"They expect one." The Queen let him watch her pace slowly to her bed, her features composed and immobile as ever. He thought he saw a trace of unrest in her movements, but had so long desensitized (or perhaps hyper-sensitized) himself to her distinct lack of anything involving a human heart that he wondered if he was just satirically making things up to amuse himself again. Maybe it had been going on so long, he'd trained himself to it, Jehu thought with a sense of mirth.

"You need only tell them that you have the proof they require. I can arrange for that." In his mind he was already planning it out, the steps that he would have to take.

After a long moment, the Queen sighed, removing her gloves. In a motion Jehu had never seen her make before, she tucked one lock of hair beside her ear.

"You are a skilled liar, Jehu," was all she said, disapproving.

He couldn't help but smile a little then, despite it all. She didn't lie in her own right. It was what fascinated him about her to begin with — almost an idealism spiraling in reverse. _But would you have me any other way, my little warrior queen? Would you need me then?_ He didn't say that. He said instead, with blatant sarcasm, "At your disposal. You have only to say what you wish of me."

"You sound certain of that."

Jehu smiled further, amused by the accusation, although he did not understand it. "I speak the truth."

"You might. Have you spoken the truth, from the very beginning?"

For a second, he had to check if he was hearing things properly this time, and he was certain the dumbfounded look that had found its way onto his face showed it. Not only had she asked him a question in a completely non-rhetorical way, which _did not happen_, but it carried a tone he didn't have to wonder about imagining.

Distrust.

Unable to do much else, he slid the smile back on his face in order to respond properly. "I have—"

His mistake was made when he decided to gauge the Queen for a reaction, and found tension there. The tightly-wound tension of a predator about to strike… and yet, the comparison didn't fit. The Supreme Queen didn't kill because she had to at all, and the Supreme King who had been privileged enough to get so close to her knew that better than anyone. As devoid she seemed of anything human, she possessed an undeniable free will.

It made her _too_ human, in retrospect, to possibly be the mechanical being he had pegged her for for so long. Lacking emotions or morals while possessing enough individual will to do what you wanted was—

"—never lied to you once, my Queen."

Jehu felt the clank of metal gauntlets more than heard them, and suddenly his entire body jerked to a stop. His hands were held by an indistinct shadow, and his back smashed into the wall so fast his breath left him. His hands slammed against his own neck, held stronger than steel by the hands of the Supreme Queen, and breathing suddenly became much harder as his throat compressed, choked by his own wrists.

He strained his muscles against her grip, but the position left him little leverage to escape with. His feet felt inexplicably leaden, and suddenly he realized gravity itself felt about ten times more potent than it should have.

"'If you lose your need for me, you may kill me,'" she repeated in a voice that edged away from vacant and into downright wrathful.

It clicked suddenly. She'd wanted him to lend his power to further her goal, and her use for him expired the second it had been accomplished.

Not about to roll over and allow her to kill him on account of any overrated romantic act of martyrdom, Jehu mustered up his own power to force his way out of the hold. As much power as he controlled, it wouldn't mean anything if he wasn't conscious to use it — adrenaline helped him scrounge up the energy faster, and it built to a cusp, but wouldn't repel her enough to get distance between them. Dimly, it occurred to him that she was imposing her own energy on him, hampering his methods of escape further.

But she wasn't allowing him to pass out yet. As though toying with him, she kept him at the edge of consciousness while she drove the sharp horns on the kneeguards of her boots into his own kneecaps, and allowed him to glance into her eyes as his vision spotted and swam helplessly.

"Super Fusion is capable now of collapsing the worlds in on themselves," the Supreme Queen said, as tiny slivers of some long-foreign emotion or other came dripping through some of the glacial cracks at last. "Nothing will remain."

"So, you… lied," Jehu wheezed out, fighting the urge to let his eyes droop closed. He was rewarded with the sight, just for a fraction of a second, of deep, resounding despair and hurt flashing across her eyes, dim with — resignation? Or was that just his eyes failing him…?

He could've looked as deep as he wanted and found nothing. The queen became the ascetic, and the ascetic became the queen.

"No," she said, and meant it, "I have never lied… in my life."

The Supreme Queen relinquished Jehu's wrists, and they dropped, already dead. The spike at her forearm drove itself right into his stately throat, and through.


End file.
